Let them eat cake!

Essentially for each section we have a package of recipes and Jean-Luc comes over and chooses one of the recipes from your package, seemingly at random, for you to make. They are in no specific order at all so it's all very unpredictable. The only recipe left in our package now is "plain muffin" which sounds really exciting. I have a feeling that isn't all we're going to be doing tomorrow.

Getting back to today... Jean-Luc began the class with a demonstration of how to make Crème Anglaise, which is a sauce used in a variety of pastries (similar to but not as thick as pastry cream) and also as the base for other sauces. Very similar to making crème brûlée, but without the oven part at the end. The demonstrations are one of my favourite parts of the class, because it feels like you're on the set of a cooking show. There isn't enough room for all of us to huddle around the table to see what is going on, so there is a long mirror strategically placed above the demonstration table, where we can see exactly what Jean-Luc is doing without standing right beside him. The pastry lab, not surprisingly, is very high-tech.

After the demonstration, we finally made our chocolate chip cookies. I have never really been able to make a good chocolate chip cookie, which seem so simple (yet so delicious) so I was apprehensive about this going well. All my fears were allayed once the cookies were out of the oven. Yum. I have a feeling the key was creaming the butter, brown sugar, and sugar really well at the beginning. I don't have much to say about these aside from the fact that they were delicious. And now I know that I can finally make chocolate chip cookies, which seems like a staple baking requirement.

The picture may be blurry, but the cookies are delicious.

We also made our first cake of this section today; it was an upside down pear cake. So making it was obviously a piece of cake, right? Right... I'd never even thought about the possibility of even attempting an upside down anything cake ever, so I was a little apprehensive. (I'm starting to notice a pattern here. Apprehension for everything.) It actually wasn't totally crazy to make either. And they looked very impressive. I'm not a huge fan of caramelized pears on cake (or caramelized fruit on cake in general), but J-L said that we could basically use any fruit; peaches, pineapple, apple, etc. could easily replace pears in the recipe. I think what scared me most about an "upside down" cake is the worry that the cake would stick to the bottom of the pan and then everything would be ruined. But it wasn't! We buttered the pan, placed a circle of parchment paper at the bottom, dusted the pan with flour, added a layer of a butter and brown sugar mixture on top of the parchment paper, arranged the pears in this mixture, and then added our batter on top of that. When all of the cakes in our group had cooled down, we sliced and tasted them -- it's weird how the same recipe can produce a bunch of different-tasting cakes. I liked mine. Except for the fruit part. But that's just because of the aforementioned dislike of fruit and cake together.

Our puff pastry is still not done yet... well, that's not entirely true. We made a tart with apples and an almond paste inside (which one of the other groups made, so I'm not sure what's in it) but we didn't have enough time to cook them today. So they'll go in the oven tomorrow. We also have the other half of our puff pastry dough, and I'm not sure what we're doing with that yet. Every day is full of surprises.

We did get to finish off our oatcakes though. We dipped them in melted chocolate (yum) which we had to temper first (I had no idea what this meant until today, even though everyone kept referring to it, but I think it basically means spreading some of your chocolate out on a marble slab until it cools down a little and then adding it back to the rest of the chocolate). Then as he demonstrated it, Jean-Luc said, "And then try a design that looks like this." He proceeded to make what seemed like the most unnecessarily complicated chocolate design ever. On purpose, I think. To get us used to piping chocolate. This, of course, required the use of a cornet into which we had to spoon chocolate, and then NOT MAKE ANY MISTAKES because it is a pain in the butt to get chocolate off an oatcake. I personally liked them better half covered in chocolate and half plain. But I don't think we had a choice. I only photographed the good ones. And I didn't document Jean-Luc's, so (luckily for me) there's nothing to compare mine to.

This was definitely the best one.

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Today's Recipes

Anglaise 
250 ml milk
250 ml cream
100 g sugar
5 egg yolk
vanilla

Chocolate Chip Cookies 
275 g butter
225 g sugar
225 g brown sugar
4 g salt
15 ml vanilla extract
3 eggs
450 g flour
8 g baking powder
400 g chocolate chunks

Upside Down Pear Cake
125 g butter
105 g brown sugar
3 pears, poached or sauteed depending on ripeness
100 g butter
200 g sugar
1 egg
1 yolk (22 g)
240 g flour
12 g baking powder
2 g ground ginger
180 ml milk
15 ml vanilla extract

Oatmeal Cakes 
400 g rolled oats
200 g flour
100 g sugar
50 g brown sugar
8 g salt
5 ml vanilla extract
375 g butter